The thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who has died of a heart attack aged 73, in the gulf coast town of Naples, Florida, was one of a handful of authors who invented and came to define airport fiction. He enjoyed a 30-year writing career in which, according to his publisher, he sold more than 210m copies of his 21 novels.

Put crudely, Ludlum was the fictional arm of the globalisation of American culture. Before him, its popular fiction had been rooted in established genres - westerns, crime fiction, historical romance, sub-James Bond spy thrillers. Like Arthur Hailey and Tom Clancy, Ludlum blasted aside such boundaries, mirroring, as he did so, the rise of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. And yet he did not write his first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance (1971), until he was in his 40s.

Ludlum was born in New York, and grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey. He left home as a teenager in 1941 and, getting a part in a touring play, tried to make it as an actor. His parents soon rescued him from Broadway, after which he spent two years with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific in the aftermath of the second world war. He then attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, where he met his actress wife, Mary Ryducha.

Together they went into the theatre, where Ludlum spent the next two decades working as an actor, with minor roles on television and on Broadway, and then as a producer, running what was allegedly America's first shopping-mall theatre, the Playhouse, in Paramus, New Jersey. In 1960, he produced The Owl And The Pussycat, using a then unknown actor named Alan Alda.

Having a famously deep voice, Ludlum also made some money doing voice-overs on the side; he once claimed that uttering the words "Plunge works fast", in a toilet cleaner commercial, put one of his sons through college. When the theatre business began to pall, he quit to write his first novel.

The key ingredients were there from the start - a grand conspiracy, and forces of unimaginable evil that only one individual could thwart. The Scarlatti Inheritance was a preposterous, yet compelling, yarn revolving around the notion that, back in the 1920s, a worldwide cabal of high-ranking Nazi sympathisers made a plan to ensure world domination. At the heart of the plan is a child called Ulster, reared specially for the job and now ready to go into action. There is only one person who can stop him - his mother.

The book was an immediate success, and Ludlum followed it up with a book a year through the 1970s, each one with the same signature-title construction. The Osterman Weekend (1972) was filmed (unmemorably) by Sam Peckinpah. The Bourne Identity (1980), perhaps the pick of the bunch, has just been filmed, with Matt Damon in the lead. One after another, the titles continued to sell more than 20m each, Ludlum's readers apparently happy enough despite the fact that his formula was becoming ever more transparent and repetitive.

Today, it has become the critical norm to rubbish Ludlum and his ilk as purveyors of semi-literate, rightwing tosh. This is unfair on several counts. For a start, no one survives long in popular fiction without having the ability to keep the pages turning. Secondly, Ludlum was not the rightwinger people tend to take mass-market thriller writers to be - the gung-ho Clancy is actually the exception to the rule. Indeed, Ludlum frequently cited living through the red-baiting McCarthy years as a key influence on his plots, which often revolved around neo-Nazi conspiracies and rarely evoked the "red menace".

Not that Ludlum should be read as a serious political commentator in the way that one might approach Eric Ambler or John Le Carré. He himself would probably have disparaged any such claims, being much given to remarks like, "I don't believe that my first name is Leo, or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller."

And that's right. His great talent was as a storyteller. Arguably, the key to Ludlum's success was precisely the fact that he took a historically political genre, the spy thriller, and turned it into pure escapism by making everything larger than life. He did this both literally - his books got longer and longer as time went on - and conceptually, since nothing less than the safety of the world was ever at stake, and the action could never be contained in a single continent. Which is part of what made him the perfect airport novelist: what better for a busy executive - or would-be executive - to read as he jets around the world than a novel that does likewise?

The other keystone of Ludlum's popularity was painstaking research. He explained that he spent about three months on research, and about 15 months writing his books. Thanks to that, his thrillers always had the air of being written by a man in the know, an important quality in popular fiction aimed at the male reader - and Ludlum is very much a writer of boys' books - who likes a hefty amount of factual information.

It is as if reading a novel would be an unforgivable indulgence if the reader did not learn something concrete from it; how to evade an infra-red security system, or the precise specification of the latest terrorist weapon. It is a trend that reached its logical conclusion in the work of Ludlum's successor, Clancy, whose books offer enough technical information for the reader to construct his own nuclear submarine.

As Ludlum's prodigious pace slowed a little, following a triple bypass in the mid-1990s, he launched a series, Robert Ludlum's Covert-One, in which his fictional ideas were fleshed out with the help of a co-writer, Gayle Lynds. However, hardcore fans were relieved to see him go solo again with his latest book, The Prometheus Deception (2000). It is typical Ludlum: a hero who realises that nothing is what it seems, a global conspiracy and endless double-crosses. This time, the menace is not neo-Nazism but the computerised surveillance culture.

Devotees will be glad to know that this will not be Ludlum's final work. At the time of his death, his publishers were quick to announce that he had been working on several books, which they were going to continue to publish.